Ian Buruma - A Japanese mirror heroes and villains of Japanese culture

A Japanese mirror heroes and villains of Japanese culture — read online for free the complete book (whole text) full work

Below is the text of the book, divided by pages. System saving the place of the last page read, allows you to conveniently read the book "A Japanese mirror heroes and villains of Japanese culture" online for free, without having to search again every time where you left off. Put a bookmark, and you can go to the page where you finished reading at any time.

Light

Font size:

↓

↑

Georgia Tahoma Arial Verdana

Reset

Interval:

↓

↑

Bookmark:

Make

1234567...66

A JAPANESE MIRROR

Ian Buruma was born in The Netherlands in 1951. After studying Chinese literature and history at Leyden University he left for Japan in 1975 to study cinema at Nihon University College of Art. He spent almost seven years in Tokyo, writing, making films and acting in the modern Japanese theatre. He is currently the Henry R. Luce Professor of Human Rights and Journalism at Bard College. He lives in New York.

First published in hardback by Jonathan Cape Ltd, 1984

This paperback edition published in Great Britain in 2012 by
Atlantic Books, an imprint of Atlantic Books, Ltd.

Copyright Ian Buruma, 1984
Preface copyright Ian Buruma, 2012

The moral right of Ian Buruma to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

The picture acknowledgements on constitute an extension of this copyright page.

Every effort has been made to trace or contact all copyright holders. The publishers will be pleased to make good any omissions or rectify any mistakes brought to their attention at the earliest opportunity.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Paperback ISBN: 978-1-84354-962-8
E-book ISBN: 978-1-78239-836-3

Printed in Great Britain

Atlantic Books

An imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd
Ormond House
2627 Boswell Street
London
WC1N 3JZ

www.atlantic-books.co.uk

For Sumie

Contents

Illustrations

Plates

An old fertility stone

A fertility goddess

Two fertility stones

Dance of The Dread Female of Heaven

Striptease, Japanese style

The lovers in Mizoguchis Taki no Shiraito

Chutaro being rejected by his mother (Mother Behind My Eyes)

The Mother of Japan trying to retrieve her son (A Japanese Tragedy)

Imamura Shoheis favourite woman, Hidari Sachiko, in Insect Woman

Mother and son, in a print by Utamaro

The Goruden (Golden) Combi

Pathos in a homu dorama

The threatening female

Tani Naomi dominating her slavish benefactor in Tanizakis A Fools Love

The old man worshipping his daughter-in-laws feet (Diary of a Madman)

Torture in a run-of-the-mill porn film

Tani Naomi being tortured in Rope and Skin

An Edo period courtesan, in a print by Utamaro

Modern Japanese amusing themselves at a geisha party

Scene in a Toruko massage parlour

Female stars playing romantic male leads (Rose of Versailles)

Tamasaburo playing an Edo period courtesan

Romance in the Takarazuka theatre

Yoshitsune as a fighting bishonen

Kirokku in a fighting mood (Elegy to Fighting)

A hero of the Hard School

Kamikaze pilots

The assassination attempt on Moronao in Chushingura

A tattooed yakuza hero

Death of the oyabun

Sugawara Bunta shooting his opponent (Fighting Without Nobility)

Takakura Ken purifying his sword with sak

Sugawara Bunta, the nihilist hero

Good old Tora-san

Crowds queuing to see the newest Tora-san film

Figures

Examples from comic-books appear on .

Preface

Few things date as fast as popular culture and few cultures are as open to new waves, new fashions, new slang, newness of any kind, as the Japanese. Because of the nature of modern mass media television, Internet, mobile phones the process of renewal is going ever faster. The most widely read Japanese novels today, albeit almost exclusively by young women, are popular romances serialized almost by the hour on mobile phones. Once popular genres like romantic porn films, produced in large numbers by the Nikkatsu studios, have disappeared. As is true in most countries, pornography has shifted almost entirely to the Internet, where it is all much more hard core.

When I wrote A Japanese Mirror in the early 1980s, all this was inconceivable. To a Japanese born in 1983, when the book was first published, most of the characters and stories described in the book, from yakuza heroes to the heart-throbs in girls manga, are probably wholly unknown.

To be sure, there are still people young people, even who enjoy reading novels by Tanizaki, and watching films by Ozu, Kurosawa, and Mizoguchi. Some may even be buying old manga. But these are becoming rarified tastes and they can no longer be classified as popular culture.

Japanese fashion Kenzo, Kansai, Mori was already well established in the 1970s, especially in Paris, and there was an art house (remember those?) audience for Japanese cinema in the larger European and American cities. But even in the early eighties, Japan was still an exotic country to most people. The worldwide popularity of Japanese anime had not even begun. The enormous fame of the Murakamis (Haruki, the writer, and Takashi, the artist) was yet to come, as was the consumption of sushi as a global food. In fact, it is the very lack of exoticism that makes Murakamis novels accessible to readers everywhere. The same is probably true of Murakami Takashis cult of cute. And the hunger for raw tuna is so universal that these great fish are destined soon to disappear from the seas.

To a contemporary reader, then, A Japanese Mirror will now have acquired a patina of age. Not that everything I wrote about in the book was new even in 1983. Far from it; some of the culture I tried to hold up to the light went back as far as the 11th century. But even historical description reflects the time when it was written. Thus, the atmosphere of the book is of a different Japan from the country today.

There are links, of course, between the present time and the pop culture of the 1970s, and, if you look hard enough, the 11th century. The sweetness and cruelty of Murakami Takashis slick modern art, derived from comic books and anime, can be found in Japanese art and entertainment of the quite distant past. Likewise, some of the sexual fantasies projected on the Internet today can doubtless still be discerned in different forms in the movies, comic books, or 18th century woodblock prints described in the book. Often, if you study the artistic expressions of an old nation, you will find continuities behind the faade of constant change. I suppose that is what we might call national identity.

Next page

1234567...66

Light

Font size:

↓

↑

Georgia Tahoma Arial Verdana

Reset

Interval:

↓

↑

Bookmark:

Make

Similar books «A Japanese mirror heroes and villains of Japanese culture»

Look at similar books to A Japanese mirror heroes and villains of Japanese culture. We have selected literature similar in name and meaning in the hope of providing readers with more options to find new, interesting, not yet read works.

Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney

The Monkey as Mirror: Symbolic Transformations in Japanese History and Ritual

Rachael Rayner

Japanese Desserts: The Best Desserts from Japanese Cuisine

Ian Buruma

The Collaborators: Three Stories of Deception and Survival in World War II

Teresa Heapy

Japanese Culture

Buruma

A Tokyo Romance

Неизвестный

A Mirror of Japanese Ornament: 600 Traditional Designs

Patricia Jane Graham

Japanese Design: Art, Aesthetics & Culture

Takezaki Kunii

An Introduction to Japanese Kanji Calligraphy

Kenneth G. Henshall

Welcome to Japanese: A Beginner’s Survey of the Language

Ian Buruma

A Tokyo Romance: A Memoir

Brian Ashcraft

Japanese Tattoos: History, Culture, Design

The Hiro Japanese Center

600 Basic Japanese Verbs The Essential Reference Guide

Discussion, reviews of the book A Japanese mirror heroes and villains of Japanese culture and just readers' own opinions. Leave your comments, write what you think about the work, its meaning or the main characters. Specify what exactly you liked and what you didn't like, and why you think so.